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Ron, You mention site speed as a factor - is our site particularly slow at loading then, is this something that might be affecting our ranking? We use a generic hosting company, so could that be a factor - is there any merit in using a dedicated server etc? Thanks, Gareth

I know that Google will index longer titles, so I suppose you could use extra characters to increase instances of keyword use. If there is little keyword use elsewhere on the page I can see this affecting rankings due to reaching a certain level of keyword use for the page overall. However, I've never heard of there being an advantage to placing your keywords anywhere other than the beginning. Ranking algorithms are well-kept secrets and subject to change, but the commercial interests of the search engines lie with striving to present the best responses to search queries. I think it likely that search engines will strive to present results based on what is visible to site visitors as this is the information which will fulfil visitor needs, and they will strive to avoid presenting pages which appear to use deceptive techniques. If the page text has adequate and appropriate keyword use you wouldn't need to play with extra long titles and descriptions. If the page text doesn't have adequate and appropriate keyword use then excessive length and keyword use in meta titles and descriptions could be interpreted as deceptive.

Hi Dan, Thanks for your reply. I see your thinking, but I guess it can be argued both ways; e.g. it could be argued that if someone is looking to purchase an 'item', they might search in the singular, e.g. "I want a shower tray", whereas if they are looking for information, they might search for it in the plural, e.g. "information on shower trays". In all honesty though, I think it comes down to the individual and the way they think when entering a search. If they think in more of a first person/self-serving kind of way, when they search, they might want to "buy a shower tray", whereas if they think in more of a third person/generalist kind of way, they might search for someone who "sells shower trays". Whether most of the population fall into the former or latter groups perhaps depends on culture and may differ from country to country. Certainly in the UK, the larger search volumes seem to lie with the singular (for our keywords at least). I guess the question really though, is whether Google makes a similar differentiation as any of our theories above, as it clearly gives different ranking positions for plural and singular versions. Gareth

From any testing I've done, keywords usually rank better when they're at or near to the beginning of a title tag and page content. I think you should definitely consider guest blogging as an alternative to article marketing. If you use the same site over again (e.g. ezine) your backlinks will be worth less for every new article you add, and depending on the categories you submit them to could be buried deeply in the site. There are some excellent SEOmoz blogs on finding relevant places to submit articles to. Also, if you have this excellent unique content, there's always a benefit in hosting it on your own site...

Hi, You are not the only one experiencing issues at the moment. Best to report your problem direct to support [at] seomoz.org with details of what you are seeing. The Rankings system is in Beta at present so far as I know, so just need to let the Moz staff know ASAP. Sha

SEOMOZ use a different method to assess an external link, then no problem SEOmoz does use a different method. The links you see are based on the Linkscape crawl of the web which is updated approximately once per month. The Linkscape database is based on the top 25% of internet pages. If your links are from pages which have low PA/DA, then they will not appear in Linkscape and therefore, they will not show in the SEOmoz tools. The Linkscape index is normally pretty good but you should understand it can take two months for a link to appear depending on when a page is crawled versus when a link is added. Also know there were some issues with the last crawl which should (hopefully) be resolved with the next results. If your SEO company can provide you a list (Excel?) of the 331 links, you can compare them to the links from Yahoo and determine the discrepancy.

ASP is dynamic. HTML is simply formatting of content. ASP streams HTML on output to the browser. You can do much much much more with ASP than with flat up HTML.

I don't think there is. Title tags and meta descriptions get cut off on the search engine results page at a certain point so that's why they have a recommended limit. As long as you don't go mad, whatever it takes to explain what is in the image. Afterall, the alt tag is there to say what the image is to people who can't see it - so just optimise from that user-friendly sense rather than thinking too much about SEO - get your keywords in if you can and if it makes sense.